John Jolliffe

The powers that were

Ivan Maisky’s diaries contain sharp insights on Chamberlain, Churchill — and the ‘blind moles’ in the House of Lords who in 1938 still proclaimed Hitler Europe’s saviour

issue 12 September 2015

  • The Maisky Diaries: Red Ambassador to the Court of St James’s 1932—1943

    edited by Gabriel Gorodetsky

    Yale University Press, pp. 632

Ivan Maisky was the Russian ambassador in London from 1932 to 1943, and his knowledge of London, and affection for it, went back to his time there as a political exile from 1912 to 1917. Even after the multitude of books published on the subject, these diaries throw new light from a fresh angle on the lead-up to 1939, and the subsequent course of the war.

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